


Clockwise

by jackaalope



Series: After the End [1]
Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:41:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 19
Words: 15,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1913148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackaalope/pseuds/jackaalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was concern written all over Marty’s face. There was nothing on Rust’s, just that old, uncertain tightness in his jaw.</p><p>EDIT: Guys, just know that this is a really intense fan fiction with many references to suicide. Please, please, please don't read it if it's going to stress you out for any reason. You're all precious and I love you and I want you to be safe and healthy and happy.<3</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Orange

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys. :) This is my first fanfiction in... two years? Three? So I might be a little rusty. (Ha. Haha.) Anyway, I hope you all like it. Please leave me some comments! Like I said, I haven't done this in a long time, so I really welcome some tips for improvement and such! Thanks for reading!

Marty’s couch was the bluish cream color of cold milk. It wasn’t quite big enough for two grown men. One corner where the wall—and the walls were orange, hideous; made the whole room look like a goddamn Creamsicle— met the ceiling, was cracked in a thin line that hung down like a tree growing up out of the sky. His coffee table had a thousand water-damage rings of three different sizes: one size fit his coffee mug (it said “Hillside Middle School” and had once been white), one fit cans of Budweiser, and the other fit the glasses in the cabinet in his kitchen. There was a fuzzy coating of dust on the baseboards. The carpet was off-white, and needed vacuuming. The man on the couch needed a shower, but he’d pull his own eyeballs out of their sockets and eat them before he’d ask Marty to—Jesus Christ, he didn’t even want to think about it.

So here he was, halfway into his third night—or was it fourth? but it couldn’t be fifth, could it?—his third night at Marty’s house, feeling more than a little chagrined over the second skin of sweat and pain and alcohol and a thousand cigarettes clinging to him, watching an overenthusiastic man with rather overenthusiastic hair making chicken marabella on Food Network. The TV was muted; Marty was asleep in the next room. But, even without the sound, just the sight of food sizzling on a stove, the oil green and hot, running off down the indents in the pan... Fuck, fuck, fuck. If his insides didn’t shut up and stop growling soon, he’d rip them out again himself. But the remote was all the way up on the other side of the coffee table and, God help him, he wasn’t about to try and get it if there was a chance that he’d fall and wake Marty up.

So he shut his eyes and tried to slow the corroded little merry-go-round that was swinging in circles inside of him, sending up high-pitched notes of pain. It was as if music, as if tinny fairground music, was always playing up there, up in his head nowadays, a constant vamp line that never resolved. Heartbeat and pulse; a stiff brain and mixed-up guts and a constantly-growling stomach that wouldn’t hold anything solid longer than a couple of minutes, that sent even Marty’s well-intended Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup back, marbled with traces of blood.

And so Rust drank beer after beer after beer, and smoked with shaking hands, and watched Food Network, and tried not to say anything too horrible. He stayed in the living room, got real friendly with the walls in traveling to the bathroom, and kept his goddamn mouth shut. It wasn’t so bad, really. The last couple of days had actually... they’d been alright.

He gave up on sleep after a few minutes—he usually did—and opened his eyes to find an infomercial playing, two white ladies in even whiter capris displaying the many functions of a blender that was half the size of the countertop. Rust watched as they fed the machine kiwis and orange juice and ice and yogurt; watched as it ground them into a thick, gelatinous goop.

Maybe, in the morning, he’d see if he could get Marty to make him a smoothie.


	2. Sepia

All Marty had by way of fruit were three cans of cans of peaches stuffed in the back of the cabinet from some long-forgotten attempt at making something that didn’t come with a microwave sleeve. He didn’t have any yogurt. He had ricotta cheese, but Rust had given him a strange look when he’d suggested the substitution. Maybe it wasn’t quite the same thing. He’d used ice cream instead, then, Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked, and it was a testament to his commitment to his partner that Marty didn’t even resent the loss—not much, anyway. He added ice, too, and a couple of unmeasured spoonfuls of the protein powder that was left over from the same strange phase a couple of years ago in which he’d bought the blender. Then, on a whim, he added a dollop of peanut butter, shut the lid, and fired it up.

  
“You keeled over yet?” he asked when he entered the living room, glass of thick, brown liquid in hand. Rust sat with his elbows on his spread knees, smoking. His eyes, fixed on the TV, were too bright.

  
“Naw, don’t think you’ll be getting so lucky today,” he said, without looking toward him.

  
“Don’t know about that,” Marty told him, and set the glass on the coffee table. “You better taste this first before you go being so sure.”

“Did you put ricotta cheese in it?”

“Thought you told me not to.”

“Guess I’ll take my chances then,” Rust said, glancing at Marty out of his peripherals, the faintest possibility of a smile at the corners of his lips.

He picked up the glass and smelled what was inside. His face didn’t change. He raised it to his lips and took a sip.

Lowering it, his eyes finally switched over to Marty, who waited with one hand on the doorframe. Rust nodded, slowly, wiped his lips with the inside of his forearm, and turned forward again.

“You make a mean smoothie, Marty,” he said to the TV, and took another sip. Marty watched his Adam’s apple jumping in his throat as he drank, watched the cigarette jittering in his fingers. Rust’s eyelids were the same color as the walls, fat and swollen around the edges. It frightened him. There was something about Rust’s posture, something about the way his face was moving—he didn’t look good. He looked crooked, somehow. Off-center.

And when he stretched forward to tap ashes into the beer can that was overflowing fluffy gray stuff onto Marty’s coffee table, he moved so strangely, so hesitantly—like a turtle poking its head out of its shell when it knows something bigger is around—that Marty came and sat down next to him. There was concern written all over Marty’s face. There was nothing on Rust’s, just that old, uncertain tightness in his jaw when moved over to give Marty some room. He didn’t look at him.

“Is this _The Brady Bunch_?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yup. Yup, there’s Marsha and Jan. It’s _The Brady Bunch_. Why the fuck are you watching _The Brady Bunch?”_

“It came on.”

“You sick of it? Want me to change it?”

Rust didn’t answer. He took another sip of the brown concoction in the glass.

“A’right,” said Marty, and snatched up the remote. He flipped through channels and found a Nascar race. “Hey, you ever get into Nascar over in Texas? It’s real big there, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Rust. Marty wasn’t sure which question he was answering.

He raised his eyebrows and flipped through a few more channels. News of flooding down in Florida. Hell, was Florida ever _not_ flooding? He clicked forward again, found the History Channel, listened to the soothing sound of the narrator’s voice.

An etching of a knight on horseback being lanced straight through the torso.

Rust paused with the glass in his hand halfway to his lips. Marty turned off the television.

They sat there for a moment in quiet before Marty said, “You okay?”

Rust nodded.

“You want to do something else? Play cards? Or Monopoly or something?”

Rust sipped his smoothie.

“Think the old owner of this place left some jigsaw puzzles in the closet, too, if you wanna do one of them.”

Nothing. Another moment in quiet, the wind brushing tree branches against the sides of the house, until Marty snapped his fingers with a sudden burst of inspiration.

“You want me to get you something to read? Go down to the library and pick out a few books?”

The corners of a laugh grew in Rust’s throat, soft and a little embarrassed.

“Naw. Naw, Marty, look, you don’t have to... try to entertain me or something. I—” He turned his head and met his eyes. Their faces were so close on that too-small couch that it almost made Marty uncomfortable, made him want to look away in the same way that the unsmiling people in old photographs did as they looked back with their sepia eyes. It made him feel as if he, Marty, were real, an observer to a moving statue called Rust, who felt no discomfort in their faces—in their eyes—being an inch apart. The world seemed to reel around them for a moment while they remained remarkably still. Rust’s eyelids were drooping half-shut. His breath smelled the way that the ground by a riverbank did when you kicked up the layer of slimy leaves and dead things from it.

“Thanks,” he said, without looking away. “For your... for everything.”

And then he turned back to the blank TV and began watching it as intently as he’d been watching _The Brady Bunch._

Marty looked back at the TV, back at Rust, back at the TV, and then down at his knees. He cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said, getting up, “The pharmacy called while I was in the kitchen and said the hospital’d called in your prescriptions. So, uh, I’m gonna go get them and if you wanna come along for the car-ride, we can—”

“How long have I been here?”

“Uh, two nights. One day—well, two days if you count this morning. Why d’you ask?”

“Feels like longer, is all.”

“Oh.” Marty stood in the doorway with his brow furrowed, one foot in the room and one foot out, watching Rust watching the blank TV. “So... you wanna come to the pharmacy?”

He wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure what he wanted the answer to be until he heard it.

“No.”

So Marty nodded, rapped the doorframe in a vague goodbye, and left. He went out to his car. And he pulled away now feeling distinctly unbalanced, as though the right half of his body was a lot lighter than it should have been.


	3. White

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings very much apply in this chapter. Be careful, you sweet petals!<3 xoxo

The moment he heard Marty’s wheels thudding over the edge of his driveway, Rust yanked himself up from the couch. The wound in his belly cried out, rang in his head with a sound like a bitch fox getting fucked, like a scream of white light. He came down the hallway with it still ringing, his eyes clamped shut, feeling the storm rumbling inside of him, reaching with his fingers until he found the open door of the bathroom and fell in on his knees. He grabbed the toilet seat. Then he vomited up the sour-smelling contents of his stomach in full, feeling his palms slipping, sweaty, on the porcelain until they fell back to his sides and he sank down with them, bits of god-knows-what clinging to the insides of his cheeks, throat burning.

  
The tiles of the bathroom floor were cold on his forehead. He lay there for a long moment, trembling, and listened to his own breath coming fast and jagged until he couldn’t stand the sound for one second longer. Then he sat up, spat into the toilet, and flushed it. His blood and Marty’s smoothie trailed around in a lazy circle, and then another, and then another, before disappearing.

  
When, what felt like hours later, he found the resolve to stand, he clambered up on his feet and rinsed his mouth out, carefully avoiding looking at the bony-faced stranger in the mirror, the bony-faced stranger with his eyes and Marty’s soft blue flannel shirt. Then he panted his way back to the living room and sank down on the couch again. And there were dark, cold patches of wetness on Marty’s old shirt, under Rust’s arms and on his back and chest. His skin felt as though it’d been cooked, and then chilled, and then reheated only to be stuffed back in the freezer, now covered in a thin layer of rime.

  
He snatched out a cigarette from the pack on the back of the sofa, tried to light it, and gave up after the eighth try. His hands were shaking too hard.

  
One day. Two nights. Well, goddamn, he knew for sure now that he was losing his already tenuous grip on reality. One day. Two nights. One day. Two nights. One—oh, holy fuck, he needed a drink. So bad, so bad that he could feel the desire lick up in his chest like sandpaper on his heart-valves, wrap its gray arms around his ribs and pulled down, hard. And there was another six pack in the fridge and half a bottle of whiskey in the back corner of the counter, and there was cough syrup in the medicine cabinet, and there was a big thing of mouthwash behind the mirror in the bathroom, and Rust knew this all because his eyes and hands and misery had gone and looked, detachedly, separate from him—when? Last night? Yesterday? Or had he just imagined it all? Oh shit. Holy fuck. He was losing it. He was really losing it now. He needed—

  
Marty was coming home soon and he’d have a little orange-plastic bottle of morphine tablets with him.

  
But Marty would know, of course. Marty knew nothing when you needed him to, knew everything when you wanted to hide. And Marty would pull his wax-and-wane intelligence out of his ass again and say, with the space between his eyebrows all crinkled up like it did, “I’m, uh... I’m gonna keep these with me, a’right?”

  
A faucet turned on somewhere in Rust’s head, then. It spilled cold hatred down his throat, trickled it through his chest, over his organs, into his belly where it sat, nauseatingly stagnant and black. Fuck him. Fuck Marty, who treated him like a child savant, who acted like he knew best. Who acted like he knew what it felt like when the ground suddenly turned into water, just because his own ground had fallen to sand. Who—

  
 _Stop blaming everybody and everything else, you sack of shit._

  
It wasn’t Marty. It wasn’t him. Marty may have been able to rub him the wrong way, but nothing had ever been his fault. Nothing; no, it was all Rust. He knew it. This whole mess, this whole thing, it was because he’d had the audacity to grab up his old partner by the arm and drag him headlong into this thing. This big endless black thing with teeth. It hadn’t ever been Marty. No, it’d all been him, Rust. Everything. Because that was what he did. He put people into danger. He didn’t look out for them. Looked out only for himself, for his own skin. Got them killed. Got them killed and hurt and bleeding over and over and over again, and the only way to end this, to put a stop to this was to—

  
He shut off his mind right then and there, reined it back in under his control. Marty would be right when he walked around with the pills clattering in his pockets, like Rust knew he would. Because maybe Rust did have it in him after all. He knew that’d been... well, that’d been a strange moment of weakness back there with that knife in his gut, and then that knife no longer in his gut, and then the blood that should have been inside of his veins coming crawling on out like silverfish from underneath base boards when the light is turned off.

  
Stay calm, he told himself. Act normal. Keep your cool around Marty, for the time being at least. The guy had enough things to act like a fucking nervous wreck over already; Rust didn’t feel the need to be one of them. And he knew he would be. No matter how awkward and unfamiliar it was to admit that there was someone looking out for him, he knew he would be. Because Marty was a goddamn golden retriever who may have often dug holes under the backyard fence, but who always came back when the sun went down. He couldn’t help it, Rust knew. He just got irreversibly attached to anyone who even glanced his way for a quarter of a second.

So when the wheels of his car were bouncing back over the edge of the driveway, Rust was still sitting on the couch, waiting for him, with his hands empty and his mind spinning.  
 


	4. Gold

There was a connectedness that had grown up between him and his partner, as rough and as natural as a scar spinning itself between the two sides of a wound. It wasn’t quite friendship. Still, it had occurred to him more than once that he liked his life a hell of a lot better with Rust in it than not. That was something, for Marty at least. He was hard-pressed to come up with any names besides those of his daughters that he could add to that particular list of people. And he’d be damned if he was going to let that list get any shorter.

So he didn't. He did exactly what Rust had known he’d do, and kept all little orange-plastic bottles at a safe distance from his partner unless he, Marty, was there to watch. He put them in the safe with his gun in the closet of his bedroom. It was an electric safe, the kind with a little computer chip in place of tumblers. No way to get in unless you knew the combination. Which, according to Marty, was unguessable.

Rust didn’t care if the combination was unguessable or not. He couldn’t have made it down the hall as far as Marty’s bedroom, even if the mood had struck him.

And it had. It did. It would again, frequently. He just sat perfectly still each time and let it burn itself down to embers inside of his belly, while his brain reviled him in the worst words it could think of. A couple of hours. That was how long each tiny inner bonfire lasted. A couple of hours and then it would be gone again, temporarily and shallowly, because Marty would come back with the little orange-plastic bottles. Between these visits, Rust looked at the walls and tried to sink and found that he could not. His skull was too full of air.

But Marty bought fruit. Strawberries and blueberries and bananas. He bought yogurt. The blender was used, and used, and used for the first time in years. He scooped out two heaping bowls of Ben and Jerry’s every night and sat down on that too-small couch next to Rust and watched whatever was on. Baseball games. _I Love Lucy_. Game shows after endless game shows.

And when Marty would fall asleep, as he invariably did after finishing both his and most of Rust’s ice-cream, Rust would turn off the TV and sit with his head leaned back against the wall, his eyes shut, and listen to Marty snore. In and out. Deep, contented breaths. Like the sound of waves coming down on an empty shore. His side pressed to Marty’s side, gently rising and falling, warmer than anything he’d known for what felt like lifetimes. And, if he were lucky, he might fall asleep.

Once, he dreamed that he was the keeper of a lighthouse.

_There, before him, was the window, through which the ocean came, reaching in its cold arms to touch his face, to soak his clothes. He was high up in the air, in his lighthouse, so high that to fall out of that window would certainly mean death, yet still the ocean came crashing in, again and again. The mirror was behind him, bigger than he was, casting strange lights on the mossy floor. He didn’t turn around to look at it. If he looked at it, the thing inside would pull him in. It was lonely inside that mirror._

_He held a candle in his hand, the kind in a curly-cued silver holder, the kind that float down staircases in old horror movies, held by an invisible hand. There was a tiny flame burning bright on that white blob of wax. It was dripping onto his hand, burning him. He didn’t move to brush it off. A big wave was coming, bigger than the rest, and it was coming straight towards his window._

When he woke up, there was a blanket draped across his shoulders. The lights were off. Marty’s snores had been transported off down the hall, but the door of the living room still hung open like the flap of an envelope.

Rust didn’t sleep again for the rest of the night, but he didn’t mind. There was gold slinking up, coating his lungs and heart and throat, a half-remembered sensation, as if from another dream.

And he didn’t even realize it then, but he was smiling.


	5. Green

Rust snored too. Not in the way that Marty did—deep and even and calm—but like a guy who’s spent a good half of the last thirty-some-odd years with a cigarette in hand. Marty knew how it went now. A kind of choking noise would rise up from the back of Rust’s throat, and then abruptly stop. His chest would remain still. His mouth, hanging open, would go silent, no air passing in or out. Ten seconds would pass. Thirty. A minute. Longer. And then, with a noise like a suction cup coming unstuck, he would suck in a snore loud enough to make the neighbors start knocking on the walls. He’d breathe, and breathe, and breathe for half a minute, like a swimmer after resurfacing at the end of a race, and then he’d start choking again.

It wasn’t pleasant to listen to; it was not in the least like waves washing up on a shore. It scared Marty. Scared the hell out of him, the first time that Rust fell asleep in the crook of his shoulder, late into the night on one of their now-ritualistic television binges. Sounded like that dumb bastard was going to suffocate to death in his sleep. But Marty couldn’t find the heart to wake him, not when he’d been watching Rust’s hands shaking and twitching and shuddering as they pulled loose threads from the blanket in his lap for hours, establishing a collection of olive green fuzz on the arm of the sofa like some strange type of Spanish moss. Better to leave his lungs clawing for footholds than his brain.

It took a good week, maybe a week and a half, but, gradually, it was almost every night that Marty would been shaken from his post-ice-cream doze by Rust nodding off again, choke-snoring fit to wake not only the dead, but him as well. It bugged the hell out of him. It really did. But he never quite found it within himself to give his partner a good old shove, because Marty knew without a doubt that the apartment would remain more silent than the grave if he went back to his own bedroom and listened to it for the night rather than sleeping. The only times that he ever heard Rust’s snores were when they came from his shoulder.

 Because Rust’s sleep, as Marty came to discover, was as thin as moth wings. Shift a little to the left, scratch an ear, sneeze—and he’d flinch up as if a cannon had gone off, his hands come up in readiness to block or to grab, eyes steel-cut with that old, rabid certainty of his. Once or twice, with his breath held and teeth grit, Marty was able to extract himself from the couch without waking him. Otherwise, it was that now-familiar flinch, the one that made Marty’s insides go sharp with pity, the one that brought chagrin into the corners of Rust’s mouth. After that and their wordless goodnight nods, the apartment was quiet—or relatively, in light of Marty’s mouth-breathing—until morning. And that was with so much morphine in Rust’s bloodstream that he didn’t even have any snide comments to make about _Jersey Shore_ when it came on.

He watched infomercials after Marty went to bed each night, and dreamed as he lay awake. He tried to pretend that he’d just closed his eyes for a moment there and dreamed all of this, all these vine-strangled years that were now his life. That this couch was another couch, a softly blue one in a yellow room. The lamp on the side-table was little and white with a porcelain base, and the side-table itself was scattered with seashells and smooth little pebbles. That on the floor was a cream-colored rug full of the hair from a cat, a cat with soft paws that would come and settle down on Rust’s chest in the middle of the night and purr, purr, purr, warm against his body. There were toys on that rug, too, red and blue and yellow and green, made of chewable materials. Books with thick, cardboard pages with bits of cloth and rubber and sandpaper worked into them, to be touched by tiny fingers, wrinkly fingers, the color and texture of pink-petaled roses, with the littlest nails, nails like the insides of whelk shells...

For someone who knew as well as he did that crying silently to oneself in the middle of the night, particularly about things that could never and would never change, was useless and contemptible and childish, Rust sure did it a lot on those nights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys. :) This is just another little vignette-type thing about Marty and Rust's sleeping habits, or those they've adopted in their recent co-habitation. Sigh. Something more interesting might happen soon. Or it might not. I don't know yet--I've come to the end of my Already-Written-Just-Have-To-Be-Edited chapters. So it might be a while until the next one.
> 
> A more technical note: In case you were wondering, the can't-breathe-while-sleeping that I've decided to give Rust (because I'm so kind to him) is called Sleep Apnea. (Spelling?) My dad has it, and it's seriously fucking scary to listen to. It also means that you literally cannot sleep, like, ever, because you're not breathing, or you snore so loudly that it wakes you up--which is actually the worst thing ever. It creates really, really, REALLY bad insomnia.
> 
> Anyway. Thank you guys for reading and I hope you all have wonderful days. :)


	6. Gray

Rust never could stand being around people for too long. Probably never would. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them. In fact, he liked people much more than anyone who had seen the things that he’d seen had any goddamn right to. But it wasn’t like that; it wasn’t puerile interest in their lives. It wasn’t any sort of undeserved empathy like that. It was just that if you watched people for long enough, they started looking like trees. Some started growing in a patch of bad soil. Some welcomed in fat, gray mushrooms. Some got choked in the race to the sun. Some got hit by lighting. And some grew just fine, but most didn’t really ever make it. It didn’t matter. A tree’s worth wasn’t based on its ability to photosynthesize. There were no good trees and bad trees, just a whole bunch of leaves in the forest. And Rust had always had a thing for ecology.

The thing was, was that when you started going on nature hikes or some shit around all these trees, you started to notice something. You started getting mosquito bites, and ticks, and thorns, and poison ivy. The deer would trip over themselves to run away. The vultures would hang in the trees with looks that wondered, “You think he’s gonna drop dead anytime soon?” And it was only a matter of time before you figured out that you weren’t welcome there. Never had been. Never would be.

It wasn’t their fault. Trees were trees. And Rust Cohle was Rust Cohle. Hence, Rust never could stand being around people for too long.

So the moment that he thought himself halfway capable of standing for long enough to take a fucking shower for Christ’s sake, like a normal human being and not some invalid in borrowed clothes with a week-and-a-half’s worth of facial hair, he went and he took a fucking shower. Because Marty, as clingy and motherly and generally irritating as he’d become, couldn’t follow him into the shower. His machismo strictly forbade it. And, as irritating as that touchy masculinity generally was, goddamn him if Rust wasn’t going to use it to his advantage when he could.

Rust turned the tap, stripped down with his back to the mirror, and stepped in under the cold water. Rust had never learned to enjoy hot showers. His father hadn’t had a water heater.

He soaped up instantly, then rinsed. He did it again. And then a third time. He washed out his hair with the bar of soap, three times. And then stood with his eyes shut, leaning back against the wall, and let the joy of being clean again linger in his skin.

Rust had very few rules. Protect children at all costs.  Don’t take anybody’s bullshit. Don’t do anything halfway. Depend solely on yourself. Remain hygienic.

He figured that as he’d broken most of the others already, he might as well soap up a couple of extra times.

The water kept going down the drain. Lazy circles. He kept watching it, thinking about those rules. Feeling that now-familiar pain where the wound was and kind of half-wishing, maybe, that it hurt just a little bit more. Was that wrong? Or was it right? He wasn’t sure. Rust had never considered himself a tree.

He turned off the water, slid back the shower’s glass divider, and clambered out onto the bathrug. He snatched up a towel and wiped his face. When he looked up, there he was, looking back at himself in the mirror.

He stared. He stared back.

Both of him came slowly forward, eyes on distrustful eyes. They reached out two identical hands. They popped open the mirror. One of them peeked into the cabinet behind it. Advil. Floss. Cream for athlete’s foot. Claritin. Mouthwash. An unopened toothbrush.

He shut the cabinet. He watched the other Rust shut the cabinet.

It was then that he started making a mental list of four-place numbers that Marty might consider significant.


	7. Crimson

Rust was showered; Rust was sharp-eyed; Rust was making irritatingly contemplative side-comments about the news anchor’s hair. Marty was so pleased that he smiled. His smile, when Rust saw it, tasted like Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream now. Rust didn’t say this. He just tried to smile back and, though it didn’t look quite as spontaneous as it should have, Marty nevertheless appreciated the effort.

That was the first afternoon of that golden-green era, the one as fragile and ephemeral as rose buds. The one in which they were, again, separate things. No more need between them. Only favors—favors of the kind that didn’t need to be asked for, didn’t need to be repaid.

On the second afternoon, Marty broke out the chessboard. He won every game. Rust swore at him when he knocked over his queen for the third time. Marty spat back. By the time that the setting sun was coming as orange and melancholy as an old dog’s yawn through the kitchen window, they were each silent with disgust at the other. It was the best day that either of them had had in a long time.

By the third afternoon, Marty had coaxed Rust into letting him take down one of the jigsaw puzzles from the top of the closet and dust it off. He spilled it out onto the coffee table in a puddle of muted colors and the itching smell of old cardboard. It sent Rust’s brain reeling around, trying to find an emergency exit from his skull. Clare had loved jigsaw puzzles. Sophia had stepped on them. Rust had laughed when her sticky baby’s feet had pulled up bits of the Eiffel Tower and of sheep pastures full of wildflowers and of garden parties with the light slanting down on challenging corners of painted grass. Clare had. Sophia had. Rust had. Had. Had. Had.

Twenty minutes later, he’d constructed the entirety of the painting’s clear blue sky in between each reminder to himself that he needed to breathe. Marty had managed to put three end pieces together.

“How the hell are you doing that?” he snarled, when he looked over to find almost a quarter of the puzzle already assembled on the coffee table in front of his partner.

“I got a thing for colors,” said Rust, and started work on a flowering tree.

It was decided that dinner was for the first time in a long time allowed to be dinner again because, as Rust had admitted, just the sight of another goddamn smoothie would likely make him sicker than any solid food. So Marty made pasta—plain, with butter and salt and pepper, like he’d seen Maggie do for the girls once upon a time. They ate in the kitchen, with real forks and real plates, and Rust tried not to shovel down his food like a wolf at the bottom of the pack. He did anyway. He felt the nausea curling up, cold, in his stomach afterward, but everything stayed inside, where it was supposed to. This normalcy was considered a success.

They played a few more games of chess with the sun glancing crimson off the sticky-polished wood surface of Marty’s kitchen table, and the world felt new and fragile and beautiful with the radio tuned to a hits station, crooning something vaguely obscene, and his stomach full, and the ashtray still half-empty, and Marty’s legions of knights and bishops and rooks utterly surrounding his pitiful white king.

Occasionally, for a few moments at a time, he would loosely believe he could get used to this.

And then the next it would all crash down on him again, that memory of velvet black that’d been hugging tight to him like a wet wool sweater these past few weeks and he’d think, _Better not._ Because, comfortable or not, he wasn’t planning on staying much longer. There were places—more familiar, more important, less ephemeral—that he wanted to be.

Numbers. Numbers. Numbers.

On the fourth morning, Marty went back to work. Rust went into Marty’s room.


	8. Black

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys. I usually do notes at the end, but I thought I should put this in the beginning, just to make sure that this chapter doesn't freak anybody out. There are MAJOR POTENTIAL TRIGGERS IN THIS CHAPTER. It is literally 100% about attempted suicide. So please don't read this if you think it might have any chance of hurting you. Okay? Just skip right on to the next chapter. You won't have missed anything essential. I just want to make sure all of you lovely people are a-okay and healthy, 'cause you're all a bunch of big old sweethearts. :)

When you were close, when you were this close, you started noticing small things. There was an overturned beetle, brown and spotted and soft-bellied, by the baseboard under the window. There was the window, spotted with dried rain. There was more rain coming; the sky outside was white, so blindingly white that it hurt Rust’s eyes to look at it. There were cars thudding occasionally past in the road, over the pothole by the mailbox. There were two doves outside, calling back and forth to one another across the street: _who-woooo? Wooo... Woop-wooo._

That spinning sensation in his head had titled itself upright now, so a Ferris Wheel seemed to be putting in its roots in the skull behind his face, rotating. Growing. His eyes closed for a moment, without his consent, and followed its lights growing around in there, inside. Yellow as Christmas decorations. He couldn’t hear his heart anymore. It didn’t bother him much.

The combination to Marty’s safe had been the last four digits of the landline in the home he’d had with Maggie and his girls, once upon a time. Hadn’t taken Rust a minute a guess. Made him feel almost guilty, knowing. Having guessed so quickly. Because of course Marty didn’t know it, but goddamn if he wasn’t the easiest riddle in the universe. Steak and potatoes. Lust and comfort. Contentment and unhappiness. Selfishness and self-loathing. An inherent need to protect. An inherent need to destroy.

Inside of his safe, Marty kept the pills and the gun. As if there wasn’t enough already to top off the list of formulaically paradoxical pairs. Rust, like an indulgent, gray-haired child in a strange sort of candy shop, had taken them both out, pills in one hand, gun in the other.

Now he sat at the foot of Marty’s bed, cross-legged. So high he felt like he could have melted into the floor. Steady-handed. More present than he had been in a long time, with the gun on the carpet in front of him, deciding quietly whether or not to leave a note.

He didn’t know what he’d write if he did. “ _Hey, Marty, thanks for saving my life—sorry I couldn’t hold onto it a little longer,”_ seemed kind of harsh, even to him. He considered adding, “ _But I tried, for you,_ ” to the end, but it was just too goddamn sappy. And this wasn’t sappy. It wasn’t emotional. It was just something he had to do.

In the end, he decided that it didn’t make any difference. He wasn’t going to leave anything behind. No note. Just an empty body, and an empty gun, and an empty bottle of pills. It was explanation enough.

The doves went on cooing on the sides of the road as he put a hand on the gun.

No fear, no fear. He’d held hundreds of guns in his life, spent more time with a one slung on his hip than without.

No fear. No fear. He picked it up.

No fear. No. Fear. He hefted it in his hand, cocked it, put his finger on the trigger.

Nofearnof—he put it in his mouth.

He shut his eyes. The Ferris Wheel had stopped spinning.

His heart was thudding again, hammering away, hard, in his chest and in his throat and in his ears and in the roof of his mouth, cold suddenly against the metal. In the finger that was ever-so-lightly pressed up against the trigger.

He sat like that for a long time, listening to the doves cooing out of the street. Listening to his heart. Listening to wheels thudding over that pothole. He listened long enough that his ming went back to revolving, that his fear became calm. Calm. So calm, the calm of lavender and three p.m. sun and comfortable couches. He could feel the white noise swallowing him, washing him, bathing him clean. He sat there and breathed and listened and grew so still inside that he must have dozed off, just for a moment, just a moment, just a moment, because then—

“Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.”

It was a very good thing that Rust’s index finger had loosened and slipped off the trigger in his dozing state, because he started like a kicked dog when he heard Marty’s voice from the door. He hadn’t noticed him there until now. Now that ya mention it, he had heard him close the door on his way in, heard him call, heard his shoes looking confusedly through the rooms, seen him walk up into the doorway. But he hadn’t quite noticed him there until now.

“Breathe, Marty,” he heard himself say. His voice sounded strange. His lips felt strange. Then he remembered that they were still around the barrel. Like a corpse frozen in a posture of just-before.

“What the fuck are you trying to... Fuck, _fuck_ , Rust. Please—”

Rust lowered the gun. He didn’t need convincing. This wasn’t the way he was gonna go. He knew that for sure. Not desperate and caged and ugly. Not in front of Marty. He wanted silence. He wanted blackness. He wanted stillness. Not a goddamn theatrical production.

He cocked an eyebrow at the vague shape of his partner crouched in the doorway. He disarmed the gun. He set it down on the carpet next to him. Then he leaned his head back on the footboard of Marty’s bed and shut his eyes.

And his brain retreated back into the velvet-lined space where the darkness still beat and pulsed and writhed while Marty flashed across the carpet between them.


	9. Blue

In that second, he thought he could understand what Rust meant by tasting certain emotions. Because if that, _that_ , wasn’t fear ringing hot and dry and metallic in his mouth, then nothing was, and that taste was letting a thousand pictures climb up the ladder out of some pit he’d dug in his head. Walls of bones and cloth. The smell of human decay—so familiar to him, but you never got used to it, not really. The sound of the wind peeking through holes in those brambles, laden with old promises, little shards of lives that would never be lived. And his face. He had the kind of smile that reminded you that a smile is just skin stretching back over a skull. Burned and gone pink. Laced over with stubble. The slackness of his jaw. Nothing in his eyes.

He was snatching up the gun. He was putting it on the bed. He was kneeling down in front of his partner. He was grabbing his shoulders.

Rust’s eyelids fluttered like a doll’s when Marty shook him. His chin tilted up and then wilted back onto his chest. A toy with spent batteries that’s been coaxed into turning on for half a droopy moment.

Marty pressed two fingers in between the sinews of his—of Cohle’s, of Rust’s, of his idiotic, miserable fucking excuse for a partner’s—neck, hard and unforgiving. His pulse was syrupy, slow as river-water.

“Rust,” he said, loud as he could with this terrible thing sticking in his throat, and shook him again. There was no response. He tried again, grabbing him, rattling his bird-bone shoulders.

“Rust, wake up, c’mon. C’mon, man.” There was nothing.

So he hit him. Hard across the face with his palm.

Eyelids came half-open for a moment. Shut. And came half-open again.

“Rust,” said Marty.

They shut. They stayed that way.

He hit him again, and Rust’s cheek was blossoming up an ugly shade of maroon, but his eyelids stayed put. Marty’s mouth was open, breath coming hard and fast between his lips.

There were doves singing out in the street.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit. _Shit_.”

And, on the last exclamation, he scooped one hand behind his partner’s back, one hand under his bent-up knees, and stood with hardly any difficulty. The other man lay in his arms, lighter than any adult had any right to be. Marty felt, for moment, as though he were carrying one of his girls inside after she’d fallen asleep in the car.

Rust’s head lolled back against his shoulder.

“You fucking asshole,” Marty growled into the empty air as he carried him. “You fucking asshole. If you w—When you wake up, I’m going to shoot you. I really am. I’m lucky as hell that I got here on time because if anyone’s going to shoot you—fucking Christ, Rust. Jesus Christ. You son of a bitch.”

And, with that, he set him down on the floor of the shower and propped him up against the wall. A little too gently for the harshness of his words. He turned the water on. Cold. Watched it soak his face, his hair. Watched him stir, slightly. Watched his mouth come open, water streaming over his top lip, dripping from the ends of his moustache. Watched him gasp. His eyes didn’t open, but he moved, leaned sideways into the shower’s corner, and palmed the wall. The outlines of the ribs in his back twisted and swelled suddenly under Marty’s T-shirt, wet and clinging.

Marty looked away; he knew what was going to happen next. He heard the vomit rush against the tiles. Once. A few jagged gasps in between. Then again.

When he looked back, Rust had sat back against the wall again with his eyes shut and his mouth hanging open, his breath pounding in and out.

“Rust.”

“Mm.”

“Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

“No.”

“I meant... I meant _should I_ call an ambulance.”

“No.” More emphatic this time.

Marty looked at him. He was the color of a corpse: cold ivory, blue veins.

“I think I need to.”

“Marty,” said Rust. His eyes had come open, cherry-rimmed and pleading. “Please.”

The water kept spiraling on down the drain in lazy circles. Endless circles. The air rung with the sound of it beating the shower floor.

Marty crouched down now on the bathroom rug, their faces two feet apart, the water pounding down between them.

“Alright, look at me, you stupid bastard.”

He didn’t need telling twice. Marty’s face was the only point of clarity in his vision, which was otherwise too clouded and murky, too tunneled to see. Each moment seemed separate from the one before it, as if time had begun to pulsate in flickers of movement, like a dance done underneath a strobe light. Now, moments later, Marty’s demand of focus seemed hours away. He still went on staring.

“Look, I know you don’t want to go back to the psych ward. But you don’t have to. I mean it. We can lie to them. I can pull some strings. I don’t want you in there either. But I think, right now, you really need to go to th—”

“I’m fine, Marty.”

The hard lines around Marty’s upper lip grew deeper. His fists were clenched now.

“You were just blacked out, Rust, and now you’re puking up your guts in my fucking shower. You look like someone’s just gone and drained all the blood out of you. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t even stand up if you tried. I dunno about you, but that doesn’t sound ‘fine’ to me. Sounds like you were being a fucking moron and decided to take half a bottle of pain meds.”

The corners of Rust’s lips twitched into a tired, miserable smile.

“I’ve had worse,” he said. His eyes were sinking shut again. He ripped them open, a little bit scared of the way the floor and ceiling swapped places, hurtled around him when he couldn’t see Marty, hold onto him.

But a half-second later they had closed again and he couldn’t seem to summon the willpower to move them this time.

Marty was shaking his shoulders. He heard his name.

“C’mon, man. C’mon, just stay awake. Just... just stay awake and I won’t take you to the hospital, a’right? Just keep proving to me that you’re still alive.”

“I’m alive,” Rust gasped as he started back awake.

“Yeah, okay then. A’right. Talk to me.”

“Talk to you?”

“Yeah, talk to me.”

“’Bout what?”

“Jesus Christ. About _this_ , you stupid son of a bitch. Why the fuck I just came home and found you... Shit. You know, you are just so _dumb_ sometimes...”

Rust just looked at him as he faded into silence.

“Well?” Marty snarled. “Got anything to say?”

He shook his head.

“Nothing,” Marty said, disbelievingly.

“Nothing.”

“Hm. You know what? You’re a selfish bastard.”

“Why don’t you ever just shut the fuck up, Marty.” It wasn’t a question. More like a dare. His jaw was set, his eyes lit up from inside in a way that made Marty’s lungs feel, suddenly, as though they’d been filled up with helium. There he was. There was Rust.

“Because I’m not scared of people becoming aware that I’m not a fucking robot,” Marty snarled at him, getting in his partner’s face now that he seemed to have returned, slightly, to his body. Water pounded onto the back of Marty’s head, but he hardly even noticed. “I show some goddamn emotion when something’s bothering me. Jesus Christ...”

Rust just kept on looking at him. Not glaring at him. Not squinting or staring or blinking or gazing. Just looking. And that, that _nothingness—_ it was practically enough to make Marty see red.

“But you—you just keep acting like everything’s perfectly fine. ‘Oh, don’t mind me; I’m just absolutely miserable.’ It’s just like—what’s going on with you? Because I sure as hell never know. I mean, you think you might’ve mentioned at some point, like, ‘Hey, Marty. Just thought you should know that I’m thinking about fucking _killing_ myself.’ I mean... C’mon, man. What were you thinking?”

His voice had gone weak halfway in, cracking and fading like the whistle of a tea kettle when the burner underneath it’s been turned off.

Rust laughed—a single cough of air through his nose, a slight upturning of his lips—but his eyes got harder. Angrier. Younger.

“You don’t wanna hear all that fucking bullshit, Marty,” he said. “You’re just saying that now ‘cause you’re feeling guilty. Which is a waste of time, if you ask me. ‘Sgot nothing to do with you.”

Something cold slithered in Marty’s chest. He stared back at Rust, water still crashing into the back of his neck, drenching him. He searched his face for a sign that he was kidding, and couldn’t find one. Couldn’t find much of anything there. Just a lined, well-worn mask.

“You’re my partner,” he said, finally. “That didn’t end. Even after you left. It’s my goddamn job to watch your back. So, yeah. It would have everything to do with me, even if it was only as simple as that. But, as it turns out, you asshole, you’re also my friend.”

Rust wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was scrutinizing the showerhead.

“So I’m here for you. All the way. Okay? You need to talk about anything, I’m all ears. You can call me at work. You can get me up in the middle of the night. Anything. You need me for three hours, I’ll be there for four. You understand?”

Rust glanced back to Marty’s face before he returned his bloodshot eyes to the showerhead and swallowed hard, Adam’s apple jumping in his throat, ashen cheeks blotching with red. Then he nodded.

“Good.”

What followed was an exhausted quiet, punctuated only by the water that was still beating down onto them. Marty felt almost as if he’d run a marathon. Rust’s eyes were slowly drooping shut again by the time that Marty found the resolve to lean back and shut off the shower. He shed his dripping shirt and left it on the floor.

“You able to get up?”

Rust nodded. He pulled himself up against the tiles of the wall and stepped out, soaking the floor. Dripping, he looked down, seemingly bewildered as to how he could have gotten so wet. Marty would have laughed if the sight weren’t so pathetic.

“You think you might fall or something if I turn my back and tell you to take those clothes off and put on a towel?”

The look that he got in return for his concern was so withering that he just shrugged and turned away toward the still-open door without further comment. A minute—filled with the flopping sounds of wet clothes being taken off—later, Rust was brushing past him for the door. Marty took him by the waist—from the feel of it, caught him just before he fell. But you could never really tell with Rust. Never could really tell.

They passed through the doorway in silence, into the hall—walls all light blue paint and hanging pictures. Pictures of his girls, from birth ‘til now. Rust watched the carpet as they walked back into the bedroom.

Marty sat his partner—his friend, his _friend_ , fuck it—down on the bed before he went back over to the gun. He looked at it for a minute. Then he leaned down and picked it up, and the empty pill bottle, unceremoniously, carried them back down the hall, and put them on the coffee table in the living room. He shut the door, as if they were haunted objects, things that could move down the hallway and throttle them both in their sleep. Then he went back to Rust, gave him another pair of boxers out of the pack of twelve from the drugstore (he wasn’t using his, goddammit; they needed at least _some_ boundaries), and pulled the covers up over him. Checked his pulse. Made sure he laid on his side. Got generally flustered and paternal again until Rust asked if he wasn’t going to get him some hot milk and fluffy slippers, too.

They slept tangled together that night like two puppies in a basket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! :) Just a reminder that Rust Cohle is literally a superman and that the rules of human medicine don't apply to him. (Especially because I've just been informed that cold showers can't actually revive people after an opiate overdose, and that if this were real, Marty would have probably just killed Rust by listening to him and not taking him to the hospital. Oh well. Sucks to suck.) Don't get your medical advice from fan fiction, particularly my lazy and completely unresearched kind. Please and thank you.
> 
> Have a great day! Oodles of luv(:


	10. Pink

He made him tea. Constant Comment: the kind with all the bits of orange rind and whatnot in it. Rust wasn’t supposed to drink coffee for a while, not ‘til that hole in his gut had healed. But caffeine seemed like a good idea. It was noon and there were pink circles under his eyes so deep that it looked like someone’d taken sandpaper to them, drawn up a response out of skin as lifeless as wet, white tissue paper.

“You... okay?” said Marty, when he came and sat down across from him, a mug in each hand. He passed one over to Rust. He didn’t take it, not yet. His hands, on Marty’s wooden table, were as lean and cold and shivery as two Canadian geese who’ve forgotten to fly south for the winter. He lifted one and took a deep pull off his cigarette before responding.

“Just peachy keen,” he purred on the exhale, eyes alight with condescension. Touchy as hell this morning. Touchy as hell _always_. He knocked ash into the chipped salsa dish in the middle of the table and slid his tea closer, slowly, carefully; looked into it like maybe if he tossed a penny into its orange-scented depths, it’d grant him a wish. Like the steadiness of hand to pick it up and take a sip. Or turning itself into beer. Or both. Both would be nice.

God, the first thing he was going to do when he could drive again was get Marty out from under his skin and get down to the liquor store. And then he could go back to his place behind the bar and just sit and have a drink. Relax. Maybe re-think things a little.

“Marty,” said Rust, struck by a sudden thought, “Where the hell is my truck?”

He was stirring a second packet of sugar into his tea.

“Oh, I called in a favor from one of the boys and they brought it back. It’s in the parking lot of that bar you’ve been living behind. Which reminds me—”

“You wanna gimme a ride down?”

Marty paused with his mug halfway to his lips, his mouth curling up in the middle and down at the ends, the edges of his eyes squinting up. He set the mug down.

“What?”

“Do you, Marty—” Rust repeated, cocking his eyebrows and leaning up in between his shoulders, thin face catching shadows. He pointed at him with a trembling finger. “—want to give me a ride down to my place?”

“You mean right now. Today.”

He nodded, his eyes still wide and bizarre.

“You gotta be kidding. Tell me you’re fucking with me.”

“Ain’t fucking with nobody,” Rust said, losing the drawn-up posture, and picked up his tea with two hands. He took a sip before any could splash out, burned his throat, and set it down with a little grimace. When he glanced up again, his blue eyes were exhausted; the rest of his face was so blank that it made Marty want to reach across the table with a fist and put something on it.

“I’m just thinking that after last night and all it’s about time for me to go,” Rust went on, looking back into his mug.

“What? You think you’ve outstayed your welcome or some shit?”

“Nothing to do with that.”

“Then what the hell are you talking about, Rust?” There was anger plain in the lines on his forehead, in the curl of the hand he was resting on the table.

“I just think it’s about time for me to get back home.”

“What home?”

And the moment the words had slipped over his lips, he wanted to grab them out of the air between them, force them back into his mouth, but it was already too late.

When Rust looked up now, he could see his soul retreating again behind the upward tug that was now creeping along the corners of his lips, see his soul slinking back under the cover of his eyes. And Marty knew he should say something, anything, but he couldn’t seem to find his voice. He just watched as Rust stubbed out his cigarette, scraped back his chair, and got up, came around the side of the table. The clammy weight of his hand fell on his shoulder. His stubble brushed his temple.

“Don't worry about it,” he said before the hand clapped Marty’s shoulder and fell away. Then he was gone. His footsteps carried him out of the kitchen and down the hall until the front door opened and softly shut again.

His breath, against Marty’s cheek, had still smelled like metal.


	11. Purple

It was a good while before Marty got up the courage to drag his sorry ass out there and apologize. Rust was sitting out on the doorstep of the apartment complex: the top stair with his knees spread and hands dangling between, trailing smoke off into the afternoon. Those wiry muscles in his back twitched a just a little, like an old hound bit by a fly, when Marty opened the door—how the hell did know who it was? He scooted over a couple of inches to make room for him without even turning his head. Marty sat down.

“Hey, Rust.”

“How you doing.”

“Look, I’m sorry about the… I’m sorry ‘bout what I said. I didn’t mean it.”

Rust sucked a drag off his cigarette in that strange way he had.

“Ah, don’t mention it,” he exhaled, eyes still fixed on a point somewhere against the sky above that strip mall across the street. “Didn’t bother me none.”

Marty followed his eyes. There was nothing there but bloated, purple-bruised clouds. They were due for a storm; it was building up all around them, had been since yesterday morning, the static growing in the air like a promise of _I’ll do it tomorrow I’ll do it tomorrow_ _I’ll do it tomorrow._ When he glanced over at Rust, his irises were twitching ever-so-slightly, as though he were reading something written up there in ink only he could see.

Something cold snaked up against Marty’s gut.

“Look,” he broke, finding the silence weighing heavy on his shoulders, “Rust, you’re freaking me out, man.”

And that got his attention. He turned his head and blinked at him, half-amused.

“That ain’t exactly a recent development, Marty.”

“More than usual.”

“Huh.” He looked back up at those clouds. “Well, no offense, but in our former situation, I’d prob’bly just tell you to fuck off. Maybe in more words than that. Maybe say you were seeing things, I’m doing fine, make suggestions as to the loneliness of a man who’s paying any attention to the loneliness of another man, et cetera, et cetera, et fuckin cetera. But since you’ve now recently gone and insinuated that my ability to ‘ _share’_ with you is the only thing keeping me out of the goddamn loony bin, then I reckon I’ve got clearance to say I’ve been freaking myself out too, Marty. Hm. Yeah. That good enough for you?”

And he took a disdainful drag off his cigarette, shuttered eyes glaring up skyward, but his cheeks were blotching over with red again.

He flinched at the sudden touch of a hand alighting in the middle of his back, a thumb rubbing circles on his spine.

“Yeah,” said Marty, quietly. “I just want you to know I’m here.”

“God fucking damn it, Marty, I always knew that.”

“Yeah, okay. But you forget it.”

“Comes back to me occasionally.”

“Yeah? Well, remember it next time, you son of a bitch.”

And the first raindrops began to fall, then, splattering the concrete with circular bits of dark.

“C’mon,” said Marty, after a moment. “Let’s go inside.”


	12. Yellow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings apply in this chapter!

Truth was the compromise between the things you said and the ones you didn’t. It mostly lay in the phrases you thought about including, but which were pruned off your sentences a split-second before you opened your mouth, before anything got too sharp, too real.

Rust said, when they got inside, “You got anything to drink?”

Marty said, “No, I don't reckon I do,” and picked up the bottle of whiskey on the counter and put it in the cabinet. He’d been careful to watch that Rust didn’t drink on his medication. He could be careful now, even when that prescription couldn’t be refilled for a long time without questions being asked.

Rust didn’t say anything after that, just cocked an eyebrow and leaned up against the doorframe, ankles crossed. He watched as Marty kept moving, banging around the kitchen like a magician trying to veer an audience’s attention away from a sleight of hand. He started a pot of water to boil. Tried an entire cabinetful of different, ill-fitting lids before he was satisfied with one. Picked a box of pasta so carefully and with so much label-reading that it almost made Rust want to laugh.

“Believe I might agree with you,” he eventually interrupted, while Marty was checking the water for any signs of bubbles for the fourth time with his back still turned to the door.

“You agree with me?” He turned. And even though rain was slicking the kitchen window with gray, Marty’s eyes were chips of clear skies in the light of the lamp over the kitchen table, his hair suddenly so yellow it filled in the air like a small sun, thumbprints of gold smeared all on the patch of wall over his head with his movement and hung like a cloud. His outline was black and humming. The ceiling was opening up. Something, close to Rust’s ear, gave a hiss like a nervous snake, and now there were lights at his feet, like spotlights, shining up hot and bright on his chin—

Rust blinked, slow and smooth, and everything folded up back together again.

“Yeah,” he said, now that he was sure.

“About what?”

“I wanna do it again.”

Again.

"You wanna do what again?"

Rust flicked his eyes over to the cabinet and back.

"That. Put it away. Leave it alone."

“You mean you want—”

“Yeah.”

“So, you want to stop drinking? Is that what we’re talking about?”

“I’m going to stop drinking. Yeah. No 'want' about it. Figure it’s gotta happen at some point, seeing as I’m going to live and all.”

There was a period of absolute silence. The water was boiling.

“Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Well. Y’know. It’s not such a big deal or anything,” Marty told him, when he could speak again, fumbling a little with the box of the pasta. His back was turned again, but his ears were flushing. “It ain't so hard.”

The joints in Rust’s fingers burned; his teeth itched; his throat crawled. Took him a minute to find his composure again. Took most of his strength not to stride over there and throttle him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling the word cut up his mouth. There was a strange kind of pride in that.

 

When he decided to try his hand at sleep that night, he walked all the way down the hall and got into Marty’s bed beside him. Again. Dignity be fucked. They already shared more personal things than a goddamn mattress.


	13. Maroon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings apply!!!!

Rust didn’t want to live anymore when he woke up that next morning.

He couldn’t remember if he’d genuinely wanted to yesterday, or if he’d just been trying to convince himself, or to convince Marty, or to slow that downward-going-elevator feeling in his chest—it didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t want to live anymore. He’d been dreaming again, and now he wasn’t.

Now he was awake and in bed with—next to, next to—Martin fucking Hart, because Marty was the best it was gonna get. But it wasn’t nearly close enough.

And so Rust got up and—flashes of light pooling on the floor—shut his eyes and felt his way to the bathroom. He locked the door. And he sank down with his back against it, the lights still off, and let out the shivery noise that’d been aching up the back of his throat.

“Fuck,” he whispered to no one in particular. “Fuck. _Fuck_.”

His cheeks were wet. His lips were loose. He wiped his nose on his arm, and then sat there with his head folded into his knees and his feet cold on the tiled floor. He opened his eyes when he couldn’t stand to see her face anymore, not one single second longer, without howling aloud in frustration. He didn’t last an eighth of a minute before his eyes were closed again, but it was gone. She was gone. Again. And again. And again.

He firmly believed, right then, that he was doomed to a spiral track. That maybe time wasn’t a circle, but a corkscrew; that maybe it was all water running clockwise down a drain, drawn from a cycle of rain and condensation, rain and condensation; that maybe Yeats was right, too. You lost a daughter twice, and you started to believe that.

He and Claire had married in a church. Rust had had no qualms about it: if it made her happy, it made her happy. He didn’t even tease her; didn’t even laugh when her parents proclaimed him a “good Christian boy”, just nodded along. Claire had gone to mass every Sunday. Sometimes Rust had tagged along and endured the priest’s endless homily just to hear her sing when the choir director opened up his arms to the pews to say, “Join us!” Just to watch her hold a little maroon-backed songbook in her hand and lilt that honey-sweet voice over her lips, to watch her cheeks go pink in response to Rust’s puppy-dog stare. He’d adored her. Worshipped the air she breathed. And when that church they’d been married in asked how many guests were expected for the groom’s side of the chapel, he didn’t even mind telling them that he’d invited absolutely nobody. It didn’t matter. Somebody was there for him, one person. And he was there for her. One-hundred percent.

Loss. Loss, loss, loss. Again. And again. And again. Nothing changed. Nothing was altered. The same story told over and over and over again in jarringly different ways, reminders of who you had been, who you still were, who you’d always be.

When he finally got up, the sunrise was seeping in through the curtains. He unlocked the door and went quietly into the kitchen. He sat down at the table, lit a cigarette, and looked at the cabinet. He looked at it. And he looked at it. Until the little clock above the oven read five seventeen and the ashtray was halfway full.

Eventually, he stood up and quietly pushed back the chair.

Then he left the kitchen, went down the hall, and slipped back under the sheets next to Marty.


	14. Peach

He was startled out of a five-minute doze sometime just before six AM—just when the sun was breaking like an almost-ripe peach over the tree-line—by a pair of lips on his. In those moments of half-dream that arrived just before consciousness, his mind told him that they were Maggie’s. Same smell—same laundry detergent, still. He rose up into them softly, pressed a hand to the cheek beside them, and felt stubble.

A moment of pure, complete surprise.

His eyes blinked open. He pulled away. Their kiss was broken, and he felt the hand on his bicep retract with something that he might have described loosely as terror.

“Well, goddamn,” purred Rust, a grin creeping up along the sides of his eyes when he was awake enough to see. Because it was Marty, alright, and he was wide-eyed and open-mouthed, blushing fit to spontaneously combust.

“J-Jesus fucking Christ,” he spluttered.

“Mm. Don’t think He’s got a thing to do with it, Marty-boy.”

“I was… I was asleep. I—I was dreaming and I… Jesus Christ. I didn’t mean to…”

But Rust was laughing—actually laughing, in short little wheezes through his nose, his shoulders shaking with it, his stained teeth naked under lips spread wide. It was the kind of laugh that would be described in someone else with a lighter word, with something like ‘chuckle’ or ‘snicker’. But, for Rust, that laughter was the equivalent of full-out hysterical cackling.

“Shame,” he said when he was capable, swinging his legs out of bed and facing the wall, away from Marty. There was an unfamiliar quirk to his head. “Because I liked it.”

And he looked back over his shoulder, cocked an eyebrow momentarily, and then got up. He padded out into the hallway. Into the kitchen. There came the sounds of the tea kettle being filled. The stove being lit.

Marty was frozen still, staring after him, out at the sky-blue wall of the hallway opposite.

Then he got up and followed him.

“I ain’t gay,” was the first thing he said when he got to the kitchen.

“Well, that’s nice, darlin’,” Rust hummed, and winked at him over the top of the open refrigerator door.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Rust?”

And the name felt different, somehow, in his mouth. He could have gagged at the realization.

But he didn’t. Not even close.

_No. No, no, no. Holy shit. Holy—_

“’Bout what?” Rust shut the refrigerator by leaning against it with his ass, innocence laying heavy in his voice. “’Bout these eggs? I reckoned I was good on trying some more elaborate foods now. I been feelin’ a lot better. Don’t worry. I can cook ‘em myself.”

“I—Rust, c’mon. Please tell me you’re kidding me.”

“You think I should do scrambled? Or sunny-side-up? Depends if you got pepper.”

“Goddammit, you stupid bastard…”

“Ah. Pepper. Found it. S’ppose that’s sunny-side-up, then. You got bread for toast?”

“You pick now. You pick now to be in this wonderful fucking mood. What the hell’s wrong with you?” And suddenly his mouth dropped open a little. His voice got low. “Rust, are you a’right? Did you take something?”

“Naw, but…” said Rust, turning his back on Marty to look at the stove to hide the grin on his face. “A wonderful fuckingmood. Huh. Y’know, I believe you’re right. Shall we?”

And he glanced back at him over his shoulder.

Marty raised his eyes up to Rust’s face hurriedly, away from... His face broke out in red.

He had to clear his throat before he could speak.

“What… what’re you saying?” he mumbled, looking away, down at the table, down at his hands, down at anything else. Anything else as he felt Rust abandon the eggs on the countertop, stride on over to him. Saw his bare feet on the hardwood floor. Watched out of his peripherals as he put his hands on the table and leaned over him, put his lips to his ear.

“I’m saying,” he murmured, “that it’s about goddamn time.”

And then he was swinging his way out of the kitchen, into the hallway.

“C’mon,” he called, from a couple rooms over.

Marty was frozen.

“We can keep the lights off if you want, old man.”

Rust’s voice was smug, amused.

“I don’t bite,” he said.

And then, “Most of the time.”

Another moment’s deliberation but— _shit, shit, shit_ —Marty slapped his hands on the table, and got up, and followed.


	15. Silver

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR REFERENCES TO RAPE/SEXUAL ABUSE.

Rust was fragile as bird’s bones, in more ways than one. You touched him and you wondered whether he was going to fall to pieces right there on the spot, crumble into a pile of ashes and musty cloth. You spoke to him sometimes, said something you shouldn’t have, and he flitted right out of his body, left it standing there and looking at you as hollow-eyed as a cicada shell. You had to put your arms around him when you fucked him, cocoon him ever-so-gently, so he wouldn’t break. In more ways than one, in more ways than one. He still had stitches in him, after all.

For all his posturing, there was terror in his eyes the first time they kissed—the first time they really kissed, both awake, both clothed, both fully aware of this being this, whatever this was. He pulled away too fast. His mouth had been trembling.

He’d gone over to the bed and sat down with hair silver in the light and grinned and said, “C’mon, old man, let’s get this over with,” and he’d tried to say it teasingly, but he’d meant it, that last part. Get it over with. It had to happen eventually—might as well do it sooner rather than later. That was what he’d said.

And Marty’d obliged. Carefully. And Rust had born it in a way that let him know that it wasn’t anything new to him. Flinched at his touch in the same sort of way.

That’d scared the hell out of Marty. Rust’s fear. Realizing it was an old fear, beat into him somehow, somewhere. It’d scared him to death. He didn’t go anywhere near him for days, though he knew it wasn’t really fair. Just didn’t want that new knowledge circling around his head just yet—didn’t want it around Rust’s either, swooping lower and lower like an old buzzard. Must have been, though. He knew it must have been.

And Rust got worse, right after that. He’d find him in the kitchen, pacing, sweat on his brow, and Marty wouldn’t know what to do. Ask him if it was the cut, and Rust would nod—but it wasn’t. The fourth time it happened, he gave him some Advil and told him to go lie down and, when he did, Marty took the whiskey out of the cabinet and poured it down the drain, all of it. Washed out the bottle and left it, empty, on the countertop where it could be seen.

Any hints, any opening up of the conversation and attempting to peek inside that Marty did, Rust would pull his words up shut like a drawstring bag and retreat. Nothing. Nothing he did could make him talk about it, whatever it was. Whomever it had been.

And if he’d found out, Marty would have gone and put down whatever pathetic thing it was that had done this to him and had the audacity to call itself a man.

He stopped asking after a while. Figured it wasn’t doing either of them any good. He stopped acting tentative, stopped turning down Rust’s advances. Started making a few of his own, occasionally.

Two weeks in, and Rust’s gait had lost its playfulness. His voice had relaxed back into its slow drawl. Words had lost their teasing, returned to good, old-fashioned misery. And his eyes, when they met his, had lost their fear.


	16. Beige

Six weeks since Carcosa. Four weeks of being still water in a pond with no creeks leading off or in. During the afternoons, Rust’s brain felt like it might turn to applesauce and start dripping out of his nostrils any minute. He’d counted the walls in Marty’s apartment. There were eleven. Four outer ones, seven inner ones. Four rooms, one hallway. It was big enough, bigger than most places he’d stayed in his lifetime—still felt like a goddamn Tupperware container. And he felt like leftovers in the back of a fridge, slowly turning to congealed, gray mush, when Marty was at work. When Marty was at work, he sat and looked out the kitchen window at the strip mall across the street and watched the cars coming and going and the people getting out of and into them, and wondered if people would ever get tired of finding new things to own. New things to make theirs. Trying to replicate love by surrounding themselves with things that couldn’t run away from them.

And then he would wonder if maybe he shouldn’t follow their example. He didn’t want things. But maybe he should go get a fish or something. A houseplant. Something that wasn’t Marty. Get out of this apartment, go hide somewhere in peace and quiet, and buy a fucking cactus. Something that didn’t need watering. But he figured that, with his luck, it’d probably catch some kind of fungus, and then it’d die on him, too. (He’d laughed at that thought. Laughed for a good minute, loud and high-pitched until it bounced off the walls and came back to him and scared him. And when he’d stopped, there were tears on his cheeks again. Again.)

Well, at the very least, Marty wasn’t fragile. He was hard to wear down. Easy to crack, easy to set aflame, easy to soften—but halfway impossible to reduce to nothing. And Rust knew it’d take years before he’d burn him out. And he didn’t want to see Marty burned out. Which was why he had to leave. But this apartment’s floor was like quicksand and the longer he stood here, the worse his chances were of finally picking his feet up.

That was what he thought about when Marty was at work.

When Marty was home, he thought about other things. Trying not to snarl at him when he left his dirty dishes on the table. Trying not to laugh at him when he left his dirty dishes on the table. Forcing himself to leave them there—though it made the muscles tighten in his jaw—rather than submit to the implications of picking up Marty’s dirty dishes from the table and washing them, drying them, putting them away. Knowing that Marty wasn’t asking for that. Knowing, also, that Marty was.

He thought about patience. That cliché about watched pots. How the ones that weren’t even on the stove seemed to boil over all of a sudden, and needed to be placed on a lit burner to cool down.

He thought about ghosts, and their way of disappearing when they would have been useful. He needed to be more of a skeleton sometimes around Marty, to make it easier on him when he finally would slip his wrists out of the cuffs that seemed to bind him to this place, this place, this place. But he couldn’t seem to summon them up all that often nowadays, whenever they were in the same room.

But, mostly, he just thought about the way Marty tasted beige, like an in-between, like purgatory, like heroin, like a specific memory he had of the wind whipping around the veil of a willow tree somewhere, rain dripping off its leaves. Like nothing. Like dark. Like a comforter fresh out of the drier—like warmth—and an old mattress on the floor and the sound of a fly bashing its brains out against the window. Like silence. Marty tasted like silence. Marty tasted like nothing but Marty.

When Marty was home, Rust let himself think about happiness.


	17. Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops I'm actually writing a soap opera don't tell anybody

Seven weeks since Carcosa, and Marty let Rust come along to pick up the groceries. He told him they could stop off at the library afterwards, maybe get some lunch. It wasn’t much. But there were still stitches in him, and Marty’d never refilled that prescription, and though Rust fronted like he wasn’t hurting, there was no way he doing anything but.

He kept the window down in the car and smoked endlessly and didn’t say one word. But Marty knew this was his way of expressing enthusiasm, or something equivalent to it under his terms. And watching him damn near stick his head out the car window like a golden retriever, buzzing with that old, sharp-eyed excitement as they drove, made Marty feel even a little bit guilty. You’d think he’d been keeping him captive or something.

There wasn’t really any reason for choosing that particular day to let him buckle into the passenger’s seat. Just that it seemed like the poor guy’d done every one of Marty’s puzzles six times and he looked like he was starting to go limp. Washed-out. Like he was growing moss on his shoulders or something. And it just looked like what he needed was a change of scenery, even one as menial as getting the groceries.

But goddamn if seeing Rust Cohle in a grocery store wasn’t the funniest thing in the world. And near the saddest. Rust Cohle with a shopping cart clutched under his bony fingers, blue eyes scrutinizing a wall of cereal boxes with bizarre intensity, graying hair swept back to show cheeks so hollowed after these seven weeks it made you wonder how he could stand that inhumanly still without his knees buckling. He looked like somebody’s art installation, like a corpse propped up in the middle of the A&P to show the fallacies of consumerism or some shit like that. A corpse with eyes like dark stars.

When Rust glanced over sideways at the press of Marty’s stare, he winked. Long and slow and quiet. And then he picked out a box of shredded wheat, unfrosted, off brand, and continued down the aisle with their rattling cart. Marty snatched up some Honey Nut Cheerios and followed.

Strange things, what a man’ll want to eat after so long living on buttered pasta and homemade smoothies. Or maybe Rust had always eaten strange things, and taken Marty’s turkey sandwiches back in those days because they were given. Now—with a muttered but entirely genuine promise to pay Marty back later—he picked out instant oatmeal, a jar of pickle chips, a quart of dully red cherries, three cans of tuna, chunky peanut butter, orange juice with the pulp, and fucking _pumpernickel_ bread. Along with frozen hamburgers and instant coffee, of which Marty approved. And to which Marty added ketchup, mayonnaise, hamburger buns, hotdogs, sliced cheddar cheese, ham, turkey, milk, a loaf of Wonderbread, and the always-necessary pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Normal food. Human food.

They took the cart up to the front when they were done, waited in line for the register behind a family with a little girl in their cart, with feet the size of a grown man’s pinky and enormous eyes. Rust read the covers of the magazines on display.

“Look at this, darlin’,” he said suddenly, nudging Marty. “‘Three Killed in Possible Connection to D’Firenze Trials’. What do you reckon’s—” His face changed gradually to granite as he glanced over and found Marty staring at him like a rabid dog caught at the barrel of a shotgun. His voice didn’t falter. “—going on there?”

Marty cleared his throat.

“Dunno.” His face was glowing red. His lips had curled up around the edges like the corners of a wet piece of paper, leaving his crooked teeth exposed.

“Huh,” said Rust. It was almost like a laugh.

And they said nothing else to one another until the lady behind the counter had rung up their food, and Marty had paid, and they’d loaded it all into the car.

Then, as they were pulling out of the parking lot in silence, he said, “Guess I got no right to be calling you an asshole after all this time I been crashing at your place, Marty. But you know what? You’re an asshole.”

“Fuck you.”

Rust’s voice was steady, emotionless. “That your automatic response to any sort of emotion, Marty? ‘Fuck you’? Any time you got any kind of feeling, one way or the other, about anybody. ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Oh, and fuck you, too, Cohle, and let’s just see what happens afterwards.’”

Marty glanced over at him while he was driving.

“Stop bitching at me for two seconds and let me explain something to you. Alright, Rust? Listen to me. I don’t need everyone in creation going around thinking that we’re a pair of queers. You understand that?”

“I understand fine,” Rust said. His face was blank, his voice still expressionless. “You haven’t changed a bit. You still want to swing your dick around without thinking about the consequences.”

A muscle in Marty’s jaw tightened then, and Rust knew it—there it was. He’d done it already. Hadn’t taken more than a few words.

Marty didn’t say anything after that. He drove and twitched his upper lip and ground his teeth together with hands tight on the wheel.

Rust spoke, though, eventually. Maybe two or three minutes later. Halfway hoping for a protest.

“Drop me back at my place, Marty. It’s on your way. There ain’t nothing I need at yours.”

The protest didn’t come this time.

 

He closed the passenger door gently when the car had stopped, still in drive, in the parking lot. He didn’t look back. Marty didn’t watch him go.

And that was that.


	18. Cerulean

The owner was overjoyed to see him. Hadn’t been able to find anyone for the job. Had the other bartender filling the extra hours until he’d threatened to quit. Then had his niece step in to help out, but she’d headed back up to college ten days ago and he’d had to come in himself. Was starting to almost think about closing the place up, but then here come Rust Cohle: looking like he’d been to Hell and back again a handful of times in his absence, but here again. He’d been so glad to see him back that Rust hadn’t even needed to explain about being stabbed in the gut and all; everything was forgiven.

Rust spent that night getting too drunk to breathe without gasping. He stared at the wall and tried to sleep. He didn’t. When it became morning, he got up. He cleaned the entire length of the bar, and then all the glasses, and then the windows, and then the chairs and the tables. And then he mopped the floor and tried not to throw up whiskey and blood and bile into the bucket, to ignore the hundred-pound barbell that felt like it was sitting in his stomach, growing heavier at the smell of the floor cleaner and the dizzying movement of little sunsets crawling out of the cracks in the floorboards. And by that time people were coming and sitting on the stools so he went and helped them and didn’t speak to any of them. Didn’t look into any of their faces after one of them turned into ash and crumbled onto the bar in a cascade of tiny insects.

He spent a few days like that and then, by the time he was losing track of them, he came out of his room one morning and the other bartender was there and telling him, a little warily, that it was his day off. So he nodded and went back to bed and shut his eyes and didn’t sleep. He did that for as many days as he’d worked, however many that was. And then the clock that was in him spun and switched over like an automatic record player to a gear that made his limbs move and pull him back to work. And he worked a few days. Then he closed his eyes for a few more. And then he worked a few.

At some point in this long dream, a man came in who recognized him, or recognized one of him. His eyes were wide and red, and he had a black bandana tied around his head like a tag on a T-shirt, and he called Rust Crash. Rust let him. He wasn’t sure if he was Crash right now, but he didn’t really feel like Rust, either. He said some words to the man, quietly over the bar, purred at him in a drawl that felt easy in his mouth again nowadays. These slippery days and palely cerulean days. Days like so many waves. Beating away at an already-weathered rock. Lighthouse crumbling. Boats capsizing in efforts to find the shore that grows farther away by millimeters with each crash of the sea. Endless useless maps drawn out under constellations that were supposed to go somewhere but only led straight up and down. And down was the water and up was the sky and there was only something paper-thin and ephemeral pressed in between and—anyway, he got what he wanted from the man who had called him Crash and he took a few days off and drowned in it.

He came back. He got off. He came back. He got off. He stayed as sedated as was possible. He tried to turn himself to sails that hung heavy and lacked all anticipation of a breeze because nobody was coming back, nobody was ever coming back again, not any of them, not a single one, not ever.

And then one of them came back. Time was corkscrew-shaped in that way.


	19. A Million Different Colors

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, but there were already four or five cars parked outside the bar. It wasn’t a busy bar, not at all, Marty knew; it was just That Kind of bar. The first time he passed the turn-in for the parking lot, he drove straight past without slowing, feeling his palms sweating on the wheel. He wasn’t gonna do it. No way. It was ridiculous. It was insane and sick and perverted and—he made the U-turn and drove past it again, telling himself he was headed home. But this time he slowed in front of the entrance, squinted over at the windows gleaming dark in the afternoon sun. Then he sped up again, so hard his spine pressed into his seat. No way. No fucking way. No way was he crawling back in there, looking for some other guy’s hand in… in what? Partnership? That word meant more than it had before, and he wasn’t sure that it didn’t make him downright nauseous now. Nauseous. Wrong word. There were birds flapping away in his belly, whole birds with claws and feathered wings. Live birds. And he kind of liked it.

He admitted it to himself, then. Again. He liked it. He _liked_ it, goddammit, and there was embarrassed sweat at his temples. Prickles of self-hatred in his gut, but also something stronger and infinitely better. Something warm and soft and gentle.

He made another U-turn and, with an aggravated noise in his throat, pulled into the parking lot. Found a spot. Turned the key in the ignition. Clambered out immediately—he had to, or he’d never do it. Didn’t even bother to lock the car; just pocketed the key and strode to the door and opened it to find a dark space full of the smell of beer and floor cleaner, and the sunlight in his eyes turning everything flat and blue. There was no music, no talk. Just the sweeping of a rag over rough wood.

And there was Rust.

The floorboards creaked a little when Marty found the courage to cross them, and Rust’s hands paused in wiping down the counter. Not that he’d looked up, or so much as flicked his eyes in the direction of the door. He just froze like a dog that’s caught a rabbit’s scent, gone cold-blooded and stone in the face of recognition of some sort of frequency or vibration. He always did have some spooky intuition.

Marty came and put his palms on the wood in front of him, and his Adam’s apple quivered. Just ever so slightly. He nodded. Slowly, he looked up.

And then Marty was taking the back of his head in one hand and putting the other on his jaw, pulling him gently forward to breach the space between their mouths. Five seconds, and the hand was on his neck, the other pressed over his ear like a seashell whispering about the ocean or something—but it didn’t matter. Ten seconds, and he had a fistful of his hair and everything kind of spun, then, out of control and they breathed, hushed and warm, over one another’s lips.

When Marty opened his eyes the light through the window was streaming in gold through the window and Rust was there. Someone was wolf-whistling from the corner. Laughter. Marty joined them and watched the corners of Rust’s lips turn up, slightly. There were floods receding in his chest, ships landing.

“Hey, Rust,” he said.

Rust tried, “Marty,” casually, like a polite nod, but it came out in a croak. His eyelashes were a million different colors in the light.

And Marty reached out a hand and took his. Rust blinked down at them sitting there on the countertop, intertwined, as though he hadn’t felt the motion, was only noticing it now that he could see it. So Marty took his other hand too.

“What time do you get off?”

The men in the corners and along the counter were watching intently, some of them grinning.

“Midnight.”

“A’right.” He squeezed Rust’s hands before he let go and slid into the nearest stool. “Have at me, bartender. I ain’t got anywhere to drive.”


End file.
